Ulla-Maaria Mutanen's new project is called "Social Objecs" and aims at building and testing "simple service concepts for labeling, bookmarking and communicating around design, art and craft objects: The purpose is to bring together four kinds of groups: 1) technology developers, who are interested...
Street life in Lausanne
Spotted in Lausanne, in front of the railway station, there is an interesting stairway (next to the MacDonald) where teens usually hang out: The first picture shows a tagged floppy disk stuck on a concrete wall. The second one is an interesting set of street annotations: "Jesus comes back" on a t...
From proactive computing to proactive people in Ubicomp
Rogers, Y. (2006) Moving on from Weiser's vision of of calm computing: engaging UbiComp experiences. In: P. Dourish and A. Friday (Eds.) Ubicomp 2006 Proceedings, LNCS 4206, pp. 404-421, Springer-Verlag. In this paper, the author starts from the classical ubicomp description by Mark Weisre about a ...
ATM as a gaming interface
Yesterday evening, some quick search on the web about using ATM interfaces as game platform led me to run across the following news: Ogaki Kyoritsu Bank is introducing fruitmachine-style games of chance which run while the ATM processes its more mundane transactions: Since Japan's economy tu...
Interest-based life logging
Blum, M. Pentland, A. Troster, G. (2006), InSense: Interest-Based Life Logging, IEEE Multimedia, 13 (4), pp. 40- 48. The paper describes a wearable data collection device called InSense based on Vannevar Bush's Memex principles. allows users to continually collect their interactions as store them...
Network Architecture Lab
The Network Architecture Lab (Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation) directed by Kazys Varnelis: Specifically, the Network Architecture Lab investigates the impact of computation and communications on architecture and urbanism. What opportunities do program...
Buxton's aphorism
A good quote that I ran across in a paper Fabien wrote: Bill Buxton's aphorism: "We need to do smart things with stupid technologies before we do stupid things with smart technologies". ...
The World Wide Lab: future of sciences as envisioned by Latour
Sorting my office at the lab, I ran across an old issue of Wired in which there was an article by Bruno Latour that I enjoyed reading: The World Wide Lab. In this article, Latour basically advocates for a paradigm change in research. Science was what was made inside the walls where white coats wer...
Google Earth + sketchup = non avatar based metaverse?
Seen last month in CNN Money, this article describes how the through the combination of satellite maps and 3-D software (the 3D modeling program SketchUp), Google Earth is turning into a virtual online playground. Some excerpts I found interesting below. It starts like the Second Life crazyness: Yo...
Location-based annotation
Spotted this morning in Geneva: It's written "salot" with two arrows pointing at the windows (with means in fact "salaud", there is a bad typo, an english transaltion would be "asswipe"). What's the equivalent of this with a mobile social software for location tagging? ...